Films about people can last forever because their concerns are the same throughout time. A Chaplin comedy from the '30s or a Sirk melodrama from the '50s still speak to us because, though the fashion and customs are old-fashioned, what it is to be human remains the same. But films about technology are obsolete from the start. Just look at Tron, a film from 1982 made to play like a computer game. It starred Jeff Bridges as a computer hacker who went 'in' to The Grid. At the time, it was pioneering in its use of computer graphics. Today, it lives on as a lone, fizzing neuron in the memories of a few 45-year-old men. But don't let that stop Hollywood whipping up a faux nostalgia 28 years after most people have forgotten about it.
Things have evolved in Tron: Legacy. Where in the first film we got one Jeff Bridges, here we get two. Ordinarily, this would be a treat: Bridges, with his cranky, offbeat eccentricity has notched up a remarkable slew of films. But he's not quite himself here. When we first see his Kevin Flynn, it is 1989 and he's regaling his son Sam at bedtime with stories of his earlier Tron adventures, giving us a little back story. Something's up though. It's his face. It looks like it fell into a bucket of Botox. Instead, Bridges has been computer-regenerated to look younger. Any wonder his character mysteriously disappears.
Jump to the future and grown-up Sam (Garrett Hedlund), a clean-shaven human drone, stumbles on Kevin's secret behind a wall in a dusty arcade. He finds himself zapped and reconstituted into the 3D universe of 'The Grid'. The place is not unlike a giant neon disco the size of a city with throbbing techno courtesy of Daft Punk (who cameo in robot costume). It also doubles as a gaming arena where Sam must play for his life, in a hi-tech setting that feels like different levels of a computer game.
The despot lording the games looks suspiciously like his father. But he's not. He's Cru, a clone computer program gone rogue with the same plastic face as his real daddy back in 1989. No wonder Sam is confused. Cru believes in absolute perfection and behaves like Hitler, having ethnically cleansed, we will learn, a whole tribe of naturally occurring programs called ISOs. But how he got all this negative emotion without a disruptive childhood is anybody's guess.
When finally we meet the real Kevin Flynn, we discover the computer genius has been living in the outlands of The Grid having been banished by his own creation Cru. He meditates and has a raven beauty program called Quorra (Olivia Wilde) for company. Flynn looks like The Dude from The Big Lebowski but has aged something terrible. And you do wonder what was the point of going digital if it is going to make you age so badly.
But then other things don't add up. Sam and Kevin catch up over dinner in a palatial white villa straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. So they eat, and they sleep and you wonder why they have to do any of this if they are no longer human. And, heck, why do we even need gravity in here?
Meanwhile, the baddie computer programs drink in a cocktail bar – the worst of them being a super-camp Michael Sheen as a Bowie-esque villain – and you wonder do they pee as well? All this adds up to the film's central failing: for all its sense of wow-futurism, it can only imagine a world through clichés of human behaviour.
You can work with that if the story is any good. But Tron, despite its fancy 3D, is helplessly flat. The writers' approach is to throw everything into the mix. I mean everything. Kevin, Sam and Quorra battle Cru and his cronies in a post-modern mash-up with particles stolen from every big sci-fi action stomper from the past three decades. It is laughably bonkers and little of it makes sense, though thankfully the film puts the bad guys in neon orange and the good guys in shiny silver, so you don't even have to bring your brain.
No wonder Bridges looks depressed. He drags himself through each scene like a man awaiting death, the dialogue forming like clay in his mouth. Should we be surprised? The director, Joseph Kosinski, is a boy-with-toys first-timer whose background is special effects. Where a sharp director is all about the script (Day 1: does this make sense?), Kosinski cares only about the big shiny light show. And it is very sparkly. Tron: Legacy is so helplessly naff, so helplessly camp, it should feel out of date next week, just in time for the ironic brigade who will claim it as kitsch. "In there is the future," says Kevin Flynn. "In there is our destiny". You betcha.
Kevin Flynn turns up in Burlesque too, only here, he's wearing suspenders and a curly black wig. His face still looks like a plastic bag but his voice has changed. It's now toneless and odd, and he keeps offering advice to Christina Aguilera's talented young dancer who has escaped from Hicksville USA to come to LA to make it. You are not good enough to dance in my burlesque club, he tells her. Yes I am, she says, and proves it. (The dance routines are more strip-club than burlesque, but try explaining that to the film's target audience of seven-year-old girls).
There is no singing allowed in my burlesque club, Kevin Flynn tells her again. But then she sings so well he changes his mind. Her nemesis dancer (Kristen Bell) scowls from the wings. The rich bad man (Eric Dane), who plans on buying the club to build a skyscraper on top of it, falls for her. The nice barman (Cam Gigandet), who wears eyeliner and whose fiancée happens to be away in New York, begins to fall for her too. The film ends with a surprise twist when Kevin Flynn is unmasked but the mask doesn't come off and it turns out it was Cher all along. Do you be-li-eve?
Speaking of belief, I sat down to watch the documentary Catfish in good faith but then things started to smell… erm… fishy. The film comes from three Schulman brothers, Ariel and Henry behind camcorders and Nev, a 24-year-old New York dance photographer with handsome features and perfect white teeth. He has a friendship with a precocious eight-year-old artist called Abby who lives in Michigan. She paints pictures of his newspaper photos and posts them to him. He's chuffed. They become friends on Facebook. Then he becomes pals with Abby's mom and dad too and then her stepsister Megan gets in on the act. She looks pretty hot in her Facebook snaps and Nev is smitten. They begin a Facebook romance. They text and email. They talk on the phone. She records and sends him MP3s. Lucky for us the brothers are there to chart it all, though you start to wonder why they don't video chat.
The film is stitched together with screen shots of social media and various trips on Google Maps. And at first you think the brothers are charting this brave new world of social media – the birth of a Facebook romance. But then Nev develops suspicions that Megan is not all that she says she is. Is he being duped?
Trust on the internet emerges as the documentary's theme, but it quickly extends to the viewer's relationship with the film. Alarm bells were sounding in my head watching the remarkable neatness with which discoveries are made and events begin to pan out. And then there's the face of Nev who wears the smile of insincerity throughout. His emotions ring hollow. He looks like he's faking it. Can we believe what the brothers uncover? Perhaps it's real. Or perhaps the sense of distrust it engenders is precisely the point. Caveat emptor!
December 19, 2010
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